Five members of a relatively new Arizona Department of Public Safety unit are responsible for confiscating nearly 15,000 pounds of pot, more than 300 pounds of cocaine and about 20 pounds of heroin in the past 18 months.

The officers are part of a DPS unit - the only one of its kind in the country - that combines the talents of some of the agency's more successful drug-interdiction officers with the technical skills of those who understand the smallest of details involved in commercial vehicle enforcement, said department director Roger Vanderpool.

"As financial conditions improve, which seems to be the trajectory, it's a legitimate point to consider what you want to do in terms of your purchase programs," Dudley told CNBC in an interview broadcast on Monday.

Disney is striking the biggest media deal of the year so far -- one that will unite the Incredible Hulk and Mickey Mouse -- at a time when the media business is struggling to cope with spending cutbacks by both consumers and advertisers.

The six-core AMD Opteron EE consumes 40 watts, and is designed for 2P servers, among the most popular in the virtualized server space. The chip will cost $989, and will begin shipping on today.

To maintain the same thermal envelope as the previous generation chip, the Opteron 2419 EE runs at 1.8 GHz, versus the 2.0+ GHz clock speeds of the "Shanghai" Opteron generation. AMD claims that the 2419 EE offers up to a third more performance than the 2377 EE, a four-core chip whose cores were clocked at 2.3 GHz, which also ran at a 40-watt thermal envelope.